News X World: Putin admits Russian fuel crisis

See minutes 15.20 to 20.30

Regrettably this panel discussion of the Russian fuel crisis which President Putin acknowledged yesterday was curtailed due to the breaking news of a speech by the leading Labour candidate to replace Sir Keir Starmer as Prime Minister, Andy Burnham. This deprived me of the opportunity to respond to the very unimaginative remarks of my fellow panelist from Serbia, who suggested that Russia has no possibility to respond effectively to the Ukrainian attacks on its critical energy infrastructure and who remarked that Moscow had 5 years to prepare for such attacks but did not.

Russia certainly does have the wherewithal to respond to the Ukrainian attacks and to put an immediate end to them by blowing to bits the central government in Kiev, the military and intelligence headquarters, and so forth using its hypersonic missiles.

I also was deprived of the opportunity to observe that the supposedly Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries are in fact British, French, German attacks on Russia because the long-range drones used to reach deep into Russia are most likely imports from NATO and everything needed to realize their flights into Russia comes from NATO, by which I mean the military intelligence used to establish their flight paths and targeting. To counter this, Russia could, under international rules of war, blow to bits the drone factories and military coordination centers in the said NATO countries as its response to their direct participation in the war.

Let us be frank: the admission by President Putin that there is a serious fuel shortage as a result of destruction of refineries is inviting his own overthrow. Gasolene availability and pricing is a highly political issue in Russia just as it is in the USA and Western Europe.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2026